Someone walks up to your table at breakfast. “Tennis at 10 — you in?” You don’t even think about it. You just go.
That was Club Med in the 90s. I spent summers there as a kid with my grandparents — somewhere in the south of France, I can’t even remember which village. The GOs (animateurs — basically professional fun-makers) would find you and invite you to things. Archery, swimming, competitions, random stuff you’d never do at home. And you’d say yes. Everyone would. Because that’s what you were there for.
The thing that made it work wasn’t the activities. It was the default. Saying yes was normal. Sitting at a stranger’s table was normal. Nobody asked permission — they just showed up, and so did you.
People sat at your table uninvited. By dinner, strangers from the morning were friends. At night there’d be a show, and the people you’d played tennis with that afternoon were saving you a seat.
My grandparents went back year after year. They met couples who became real friends — not holiday-card friends, the kind who’d travel from wherever they lived to visit. Big dinners, outside when the weather was good. Wine, laughing, soirées. Almost a Great Gatsby kind of energy (minus the tragedy). These friendships lasted decades. They started because someone sat at their table without asking.
Club Med was invented after the war. People genuinely wanted that — to be together, to do things with strangers, to let loose. The concept still exists. But something changed — and I don’t think it’s what most people say.
The standard explanation is phones, busy schedules, Netflix replacing dinner parties. That’s not wrong, but it’s surface level. Everyone already knows that. The deeper shift is about status.
No one wants to seem lonely — so we convince ourselves we’re not. We spend a little more time inside. We watch the show everyone’s talking about. We share moments on Instagram and feel social after a chat with a friend (even though those chats look nothing like real interaction — it’s a weirdly exaggerated version of what we think we should say). We went from sitting at strangers’ tables to playing it safe. Everything got more careful. More aware of a faux pas. And somewhere in there, we stopped saying yes by default.
That’s the real problem. We’re not just losing social infrastructure — we’re losing the willingness to use it.
I tested this. I started asking strangers at my gym to do burpees with me — just to see if people would say yes to something spontaneous. 7 out of 8 did. In London, where the unwritten rule is headphones in, eyes down, don’t speak to anyone. The willingness was always there. Someone just needed to break the status game first.
And I’m not the only one noticing. Timeleft is filling restaurants with strangers. WeRoad is booking group trips for solo travellers. Running clubs in London have waiting lists. People are literally paying to be put in a room with other people. The demand never went away. We just buried it under pride.
And we get one shot at this. The years where you can build deep friendships, find your people, create the dinner-table-with-wine-and-laughing life my grandparents had? They don’t wait for you. Every year you spend performing “I’m fine on my own” is a year you don’t get back.
Here’s what tomorrow looks like if you make the effort: you text someone you haven’t seen in months. You show up to that run club. You sit at the table with people you don’t know. It’s uncomfortable for about 10 minutes. Then it’s not. And three months from now, those strangers are saving you a seat.
Yes, it’s effort. It will feel weird. You will want to stay home. Do it anyway. The version of your life where you’re surrounded by people who actually know you — that doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because you decided to be a little uncomfortable on a Tuesday.
That’s what I’m building with OneTrueTribe — shared physical experiences that turn strangers into friends. The idea comes directly from those Club Med summers. Not an app that replaces human connection (we have enough of those). An app that makes the first move easier — so more people get to experience what my grandparents had.
But you don’t need an app. You just need to sit at the table.